I think the bigger deal here is that they are finally supporting WebGL. They
fought against it for so long -- and their excuse was "it's insecure" HAH!
Microsoft claiming someone else's technology is insecure. That's rich.
It's pretty obvious that they didn't like that WebGL is based on OpenGL, which
is a blow to DirectX. But at this point it's looking like they had no choice
but to support it -- being the only browser that doesn't support 3D web graphics
would be even worse.

It's so much fun to see that web browsers really are becoming the universal
application client now, even for the kinds of applications that the luddites
said would never be able to go online.

It's also interesting that they've taken the "MSIE" and "compatible" tokens
out of their user-agent string. It will be very frustrating if IE 11 has
rendering bugs that web scripts cannot work around because they
can't detect the presence of IE 11. It's very arrogant of Microsoft to say
"our browser is so standards compliant we're going to lie to you and tell
you that it's actually Mozilla."

I wonder if Microsoft's actual motivation is to hide the fact that their
market share in browsers is crashing so badly that they want to make it difficult
for anyone to figure out the actual number of users out there.

Any way you slice it, though, the message is clear: desktop computing is
*over*. Good riddance!

That's a common criticism, but it doesn't have to be relevant if you don't
want it to.

Back when it was called "Network Computing" and its biggest proponents were
Sun and Oracle, the Evil Desktop Establishment worked hard to knock it down.
Back then, it was assumed that the applications would run on *your* server.
The idea of trusting your data to a service provider was nascent.

Since then, the ubiquity of mobile has moved all of the variables around,
mainly because the Big Established Players have realized that they need to
make money somewhere, so "Teh Cloud" is the buzzword of the decade.

As the lead technologist for a non-Google, non-Microsoft, non-Amazon, non-Apple,
non-Facebook data center provider, I am totally in agreement that "Teh Cloud"
is a bad idea. But the technology itself is a good idea. The best possible
outcome is to put your applications in *your* *own*
cloud. Your servers, your data center, your people running it. But you get
to take advantage of the fact that with this data model, you no longer have
to do desktop support.

Some thoughtsIs there going to be a "Google drive... for your server." type of app?I have been in areas without a network connection, what happens then? No cell phone service, no wifi, or network connection.---Speaking of which, with an andriod phone I noticed that when you lose cell phone service you also lose google maps. I downloaded the maps a head of time so that I wouldn't need to be using bandwidth while traveling. When I lost the cell phone service my android GPS couldn't tell me where I was. This is something I noticed and I will have to test this, after making sure I have everything else correct.I just put my android phone in "Airplane mode" and used Smart Tool's compass to see if the GPS location would come up, and it did.I have the county's map saved and it did appear but I was not moving so I don't know how well it would keep track of that.

I have been running it for about 6 months or so. Seems fairly stable so far. The thing I like is that you can get links to files from the web interface and post them to other systems (like wiki reference links), so you can keep your bulky files on one system and keep the wiki backup slim and trim :-)

There are a few UI bugs that I have found so far, but none of them show-stoppers, mostly annoying bits with alignment of buttons and clickable areas that should be easy to fix with css changes (but I am too lazy / busy to submit a patch). It is pretty much a LAMP site (with PHP, and MySQL for the MP bits), and has an un-complicated install. I like that fact coming from some slightly more complicated Ruby installs that try to do the same thing :-)

Have fun, and let me know if you do anything more interesting with it than I have done (file storage for internal company docs and sharing with select clients in different "folder" areas where we can limit access).

ownCloud is basically just a WebDAV server with some nice UI wrapped around
it for access by lots of different devices. I could see it useful in homes,
small organizations, and other places where the humans have not yet evolved
to the point where they can grok the extreme difficulty of that highly complex
service called "a file server"

ownCloud is basically just a WebDAV server with some nice UI wrapped around it for access by lots of different devices. I could see it useful in homes, small organizations, and other places where the humans have not yet evolved to the point where they can grok the extreme difficulty of that highly complex service called "a file server"

Or a file server shared with clients with giant Photoshop (ick) files.